


'Til Death Do We Stand

by Laurasauras



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, End of the World, F/M, hopelessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 11:52:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17807501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurasauras/pseuds/Laurasauras
Summary: A lot of the time, Rose and Dave can ignore that the world has an approaching expiry date. Other times they can't.





	'Til Death Do We Stand

**Author's Note:**

> This is pure angst. And may hit a bit close to home to those of us for whom the news is starting to sound like maybe there is a fish alien doing this all on purpose because us living underwater with clowns as world leaders would suit her better.

You can tell someone’s in your apartment from like a mile away. Well, from the hallway. You can tell it’s Rose before you’ve even put the key in the lock. You didn’t realise she’d be home, you thought she was in New York doing some fancy book thing. You’re already smiling in anticipation of seeing her. Girl’s got your heart something rotten.

Your smile falters a bit when you see her. Her head’s in her hands, elbows on your table and she’s got papers all around her. This isn’t editing Rose, frustrated at herself for being unable to cut any of her words but needing to to please her publisher, someone else is making her sad. Your hand closes around air as if you can slay whatever it is that’s making her look like this.

‘Hey,’ you say. ‘I didn’t expect you.’

‘Tea,’ she insists.

You walk to the kitchen obediently, but she corrects herself before you’ve even taken two steps. 

‘Beer.’

‘Right you are,’ you say. ‘Beer’s good. I have wine, you know, ‘cause I love you, or I could make you a daiquiri, I am fully stocked, my assistant is basically marriage worthy—’

‘Just get me a fucking beer,’ she says.

You wince, not because her tone is angry or impatient, but because she sounds so done. You grab two beers and flashstep back to her, she doesn’t deserve to be kept waiting even a second longer than necessary. 

You put the beers on the table and your hand on her back. Her hair is covering the parts of her face her hands aren’t, you can’t tell if she’s been crying or not. You hate this so much. 

‘Hey,’ you say softly. ‘What’s going on.’

She pulls her head up, and her eyes are normal, if tired. You try not to sigh obviously with relief. If Rose cries, you’re fucking bawling, you’re useless if she’s upset. 

‘I don’t know whether to choose fixed or variable rate interest on my mortgage,’ she says.

‘Dude, why the fuck are you getting a mortgage, just pay it with cash, we got squillions.’

She takes a sip of her beer and pushes a page towards you. You like math, it was always a strong subject for you, and bank shit is even easier. Okay, her bank is charging her too little. You need to swap banks. How does she always pick exactly the right one? 

‘I can’t pay it with cash, I would like to be able to demonstrate the ability to pay things off, it improves your credit score.’

‘If you can pay shit with cash then what do you need a credit score for?’

Rose glares at you and takes another sip of her beer.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. She sounds sulky. Whoops. She hates it when you get things that she doesn’t.

‘You get the difference, right?’ you ask.

She gets somehow more sulky. Fuck. You’re not trying to sound condescending!

‘Fixed rate means it’ll stay as that, variable means that it could go lower if the economy changes but it could go higher as well.’

‘Right, and this is already criminally low, so you probably want to go fixed rate. Or you could peak into the future and see if it’s gonna go down. Wait, were you doing that? Is that why I see tarot cards? Rose, that’s hella unethical.’

She flicks a card at you. You catch it and look at the picture. Oh cool, Death. But no, you’re in love with a bona fide Seer, you know this doesn’t always mean literal death. Change and shit. She flicks another one your way and … okay, The Tower isn’t exactly sunshine and puppies either and cool, this is a dismal spread you’re seeing right here. 

‘Did you know tarot cards are useless for certain principles? Dates, for example. Do you know when the world will end? Because I sure don’t! Is it going to be before or after I pay off my mortgage? These fucking cards won’t tell me!’

She can get real sensitive about touch when she’s on edge like this, doesn’t like to feel like she can’t move, so you put your hand next to hers instead of pulling her in for a hug like you want to. She holds your hand for the briefest second before she gets to her feet and walks to the couch, where she’s dropped her bag, and starts to rifle through it.

You catch the magic 8 ball she throws at you. Hard.

‘Outlook not so good,’ you read.

‘I had worked that out myself, actually!’ Rose says.

She pulls out a tupperware container that seems to be full of shiny … sewing needles? And water, shakes it like it’s an 8 ball too and then looks at you expectantly.

‘That one not telling you either?’ you guess.

‘No!’ 

‘Babe if you start gutting a chicken just to demonstrate that your psychic mojo isn’t helping you I’m gonna be a bit cranky.’

She stalks over to you, slams the container of needles and water on the table next to all her important bank documents and collapses dramatically in her chair. She leans her head into your shoulder and you warily put your arm around her.

‘I want a baby,’ she says.

‘Um,’ you say. ‘Like, from me? Not a weird future meteor baby?’

She presses her face more firmly into your shoulder and her shoulders shake a bit. Fuck, you can’t see her face, is she crying? She’s just breathing, probably, you can fix this.

‘I can get you a baby,’ you say, patting her arm uselessly. ‘Look, I’ll throw away my condoms right now, or um, okay, that’s not a very quick solution and I don’t even know if I can have kids, I don’t have a belly button, that seems like an important thing, reproductively speaking, none of the girls I’ve slept with—not talking about anyone who isn’t us right now, Jesus, that was a dumb thing to bring up. I mean, if that’s gonna take too long, right, I’ll find a non-us baby for you, there are loads of abandoned kids out there! Oh God, Rose, don’t cry, I don’t want you to cry, I know I’m the worst at comforting, don’t listen to my words, okay, just listen to the sound of my voice or something.’

She’s definitely crying now, and you’re not sure if it’s because you brought up the fact that you’ve been with other girls or that babies get abandoned or that you both might be infertile, but you should basically never be allowed to open you mouth ever. 

‘I _can’t_ have a baby,’ she says, her voice muffled by your shirt, which is definitely going to look like a Rorschach painting when she’s finished getting her mascara all over it.

‘Oh, okay, well that’s a shame, but we’ll get you one. A really cute one. Or an ugly one! I know you’d love an ugly baby, let’s get you just a Benjamin Button looking motherfucker, one of those old man babies, you’d be such a great mom to an ugly baby.’ 

She hits you and you shut up, even though she barely connected her palm to your chest. She can hit you way harder than that and you’re not in the business of giving her a reason to.

‘We’re going to die, Dave,’ she says.

‘Oh, yeah, sure, but so’s everyone, right? We don’t let that shit stop us, ‘cause no one knows they’re making it to 100, right?’

‘We can’t exactly take a baby with us to fight the Batterwitch to the death.’

‘In a papoose,’ you mumble, because that was a helluva mental image. In your mind, you’re the one with the baby strapped to your back like a backpack. That’d be so badass.

She laughs sadly. 

‘Our lives are bullshit,’ she says. ‘I break down trying to get a fucking loan because I have no idea if I’ll be alive in five years, let alone twenty, I don’t know if the _bank_ will be. You know the stupid trendsetting children are starting to tattoo their blood?’ She snatches the magic 8 ball from your hand and shakes it. ‘Will the process of tattooing blood be deadly? “It is certain”, do you know how rare it is to get that?’

‘One in twenty?’ you guess.

‘Maybe for you,’ she says darkly.

‘Just get the fixed rate,’ you say.

She pushes away from the table and you so violently that the table scrapes against the floor a few inches. 

‘What the fuck do we do? What the fuck! It’s too much, it’s too hard to worry about fucking dry-cleaning and em dashes when we’re dying here!’

‘We’re not—’

‘We _are_ , Dave. It’s coming, can’t you feel it?’

You stand now, and you have to flashstep to catch her mid pace. No one else could make her stop, you don’t like feeling her fight against you, but she’s got to calm down. You pin her arms to her side and her chest to yours, and it probably looks like a hug, it kinda feels like a hug except to let her go is to get punched and you both know it. You keep her still until she stops trying to wrench out of your arms, until she’s stopped pretending to relax so you’ll let her go and until you feel the kind of defeat she can’t fake.

‘It’s too much,’ she repeats.

‘Yeah,’ you agree. ‘Gotta do it anyway.’

‘We’re not going to beat her.’

‘Is that … Like are you being hopeless right now or are you saying that as fact?’

When she pulls back this time, you let her. She takes a long pull of her beer as she starts to gather up her tarot cards. They work for her, everything luck and fortune based does. You don’t need details though. You dig in your pocket until you find a quarter and hand it to her instead.

‘Heads, we win; tails, we lose,’ she says. 

She flips the coin and you suddenly don’t want to know. You can’t know. You already know your kid’s a millenia in the future, you don’t need to know exactly how long you miss him by. You grab her wrist before she can uncover it.

‘Do you know?’ you ask.

She nods.

Well fuck. You can’t … She doesn’t deserve to hold that knowledge on her own. You let go of her wrist.

It’s tails. Of course it is. She knew, she told you. It still hits you like a fucking truck. You cover it with your hand, you can’t look at it.

‘We just … fail?’ you ask. ‘Just like that? We’re here to … what? Balance out our kids’ existence?’

She guides your hand away and tips the coin back into her hand.

‘Heads, we have victories before our defeat. Tails, it’s meaningless.’

She flips the coin. Heads. You draw a ragged breath into your lungs. You want to stop her as she repeats the motion. You don’t know how much more of this you can take.

‘Heads, we die together. Tails, alone.’

You close your eyes. You can’t … She can’t die. She will, of course she will, but …

Your eyes prickle and burn behind your lids. You force yourself to breathe, even though you can’t make it happen steadily. 

‘Dave,’ she says quietly.

‘You push me so fucking far, Lalonde,’ you tell her.

You hear the chink as she sets the coin down, and then her footstep as she moves into your arms. You let her pull you towards her, keeping your eyes closed as she kisses you. You wrap your arms around her waist, lift her up a little as you bring her as close as she can get to you. 

‘Sorry,’ she whispers.

‘What was it?’ you ask. Your lips are millimeters apart.

‘Heads.’

‘Thank fuck,’ you groan. 

There’s nothing either of you can say to change the fact that the world is ending or that you don’t think you’re going the way of Jade English, still fighting back at 92 when you stopped getting letters from her, but you’ll be together. You’re always together, that’s the deal.

(Later, you’ll confront _her_ lackeys separately and you won’t die because it’s not time, and you’ll let her go alone because she’s not dying without you and she can handle Fieri. She can handle anyone. And she’ll let you go alone to the White House for the same reason. Neither of you will let the other go alone to the Batterwitch, and Rose will have long lost all her various divination devices except a dented quarter and she won’t need it to know that this is it. Neither will you. Not like there's much of the world to live for anymore anyway, but you'll still fight like there is because you'd live to the end of your days in the apocalypse if you had her company. And you’ll still make the bitch bleed before she takes you out.)


End file.
